Vemund Skygazer on the Miner’s Choice initiative: miners have every right to their autonomy

All nChain and CoinGeek had to do was point this out.

Last week, I pointed out the long-term implications of the Miner’s Choice initiative for the micro-economy—small-time marketplaces like those in the Philippines, with street vendors that repackage and sell goods at tinier fractions than their mass distributed proportions. In his Yours.org post, user Vemund Skygazer brings forward another important point about what the Miners initiative really is: a reminder to miners that they have power, perhaps not in directly tweaking protocol, but in establishing community standards, practices, and ethics outside of the code.

“Other than the potential use-cases and user attraction – what this also, and maybe more importantly implies, is that it is the miners’ way of stating an independence from previous and outdated social governance…”

After all, miners are the lifeblood of a network, without which the blockchain dies. Yet for a long time they have remained silent throughout protocol changes. But as recent events in the history of Bitcoin unfolded, it became apparent that they needed to be more active in the discourse. This was the same sentiment Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu expressed at last month’s CoinGeek Conference.

And the declaration is quickly spreading throughout the community. We are starting to recognize that miners’ rights do not become active only when it’s time to vote between proposals dictated by others.

In his post, titled “Reclaiming the miners’ autonomy and unleashing the capitalist power of Bitcoin,” Vemund Skygazer reiterates Bitcoin’s incentive system—that miners have every right to configure their systems to their most optimal state, if that yields to better profit rates.

“Miners will tweak their hardware AND software to produce the best results, simply because they have to, in order to compete with other miners – this is at the heart of Bitcoin,” he wrote.

“The economic incentive miners live by directly ‘forces’ them to grow, strengthen and secure the network, continuously! It is ‘greed’ channeled into a system, which may assist the economic liberation for people across the world.”

Vemund Skygazer also points out that the Miner’s Choice initiative is a movement to recognize miners as an integral part of the system—contrary to the demonization they have unrightfully endured the past years. And all CoinGeek and nChain needed to do was point it out to the community.

“What nChain and Coingeek merely has done, is to bring awareness to this fact, that miners can choose, they are not subject to socially agreed upon ‘rules’ outside the Bitcoin protocol.”

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (SegWit) chain are referenced as BTC coins; tokens on the Bitcoin Cash ABC chain are referenced as BCH, BCH-ABC or BAB coins.

Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) is today the only Bitcoin project that follows the original Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper, and that follows the original Satoshi protocol and design. BSV is the only public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin and will massively scale to become the world’s new money and enterprise blockchain.